According to industry sources, AMD pushed launch of its next-generation Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" family of GPUs to the second quarter of 2013 (April-June). The delay comes in the wake of the company going through reorganization within its ranks, in response to poor market performance in Q3-2012. The company originally planned to launch its GPUs before the end of 2012. NVIDIA plans to launch a refreshed lineup of Kepler GPUs in 2013.

As a real economic strategy (other than boost Xmas sales) this is not clever. ANY product launch to make AMD more competitive should be brought forward not pushed back. I worry about the competence of the people at the top that think "reorganising" is a priority over business development. Typical "administrators" at the top, not leaders.

As a real economic strategy (other than boost Xmas sales) this is not clever. ANY product launch to make AMD more competitive should be brought forward not pushed back. I worry about the competence of the people at the top that think "reorganising" is a priority over business development. Typical "administrators" at the top, not leaders.

There's also the fact that AMD seem to have just swapped places with Nvidia for this generation. AMD seem to be the cards-of-choice since their new drivers and price cuts. They probably want to sell a few more 7000s first.

It would look even better, make lots of sense if both AMD Radeon 7xxx & Nvidia Geforce 6xx hold back next year and do not release refresh cards on the same architecture, they should hold just fine and push game developers to code better games that are less buggy if consoles game developers can do fine with same hardware for five years and still produce advanced games why not PC game developers?

AMD & Nvidia should be working on the next major architecture that should come out 2014 rather than working on refresh at list like that we will get better hardware that has matured.

They wouldn't push back a launch date if they had a new product to sell now. They likely ran into technical problems.

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While I would normally say that's sometimes the logical thinking, this time I don't know... I think the silicon/process is probably fine, if I was AMD I'd see waiting for several reasons.

First, I’d say AMD has the current market covered on $/performance and AMD doesn’t see themselves slipping any in sales to Nvidia, so milking it isn't a problem. I think both AMD/Nvidia would like to give both Volcanic Islands and Maxwell GPU’s more breathing room. AMD knows Nvidia won't be moving with their Kepler refresh of cards till more July-Aug 2013, or is there any firm timeline on those? I think AMD didn't like that there was such a gap for Nvidia and Kepler, they want to close that. Sure I’d (AMD) would want to be first and they will, but I don't see them wanting to give the competitor again the opportunity to completely juggle their product line-up as they start seeing all my cards. Next I think AMD also wants to pressure Nvidia to either release the GK110 card prior, and be able to figure out how best to juggle their top offering; or see if Nvidia will hide it till after the Venus XTX release. Either way that will say a bunch about what is Nvidias' level of confidence for that part. Next I think AMD can take such time to again find driver optimizations for their new GNC architecture which is still a learning curve for them.

I'd say for AMD this has less to do with reorganization, although it has a lot to do with in terms of manpower. So if needing to really execute why rush... Is Nvidia showing any signs of being on-time or ahead of the curve this time? Good for AMD take the 3 months, collect a good war-chest of silicon, fully vetted drivers, and wait till they see the "green of their eyes!"

I'm sure AMD would be very glad to take away from Nvidia's profits in the HPC sector by forcing them to release GK110 as a GeForce.

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AMD won't be doing the forcing. GK110 as GeForce will come down to binning for high leakage and/or and fully functional 15SMX GPU's that can't be used in the professional sector. Nvidia would look at K20/K20X and its likely Quadro follow on as drop in upgrades for users with previous gen Tesla/Quadro- that means keeping boards in the ~225/235W power envelope- and that taking into account the larger VRAM component.

Time for the arguments to swap fan bases (again)...absolute performance and compute will become relevant again to the Nvidia crowd, and the AMD fans will have to reword their old performance/mm^2 and performance/watt postings from pre-Tahiti
@Casecutter
Might it be a case of:
1.maximizing ROI for AMD -the bottom line now seems "cut-to-the-bone". Selling off your assets and shitcanning your workforce seems as odds with the Gunfight at the OK Corral scenario you envisage for AMD and Nv. And;
2. Both AMD and Nvidia would likely see the next round of cards as the final one before moving to 20nm. I'd think that both would try to squeeze out of 28nm what they can, just in case the 20nm ramp isn't overly smooth (afaia, TSMC's tooling is only just now being validated, and TSMC haven't announced a volume production date). And early launch for Sea Islands and a late launch for HD-over-9000 might make for some dismal quarters between the two.

At this stage, I don't think AMD or Nvidia would be overly unhappy with their respective hardware -both seem to have executed reasonably well. AMD's biggest problem is not getting the hardware out, but supporting/marketing the product in strength before and after it hits the channel- and that has less to do with Nvidia than it does AMD's own competency.

These were supposed to come out this year? I just assumed nVidia and ATI were releasing their nex gen Q2-Q3 2013, so doesn't really change any of my plans. Since the next gen will basically be improved efficiency, it'll be interesting to see how an OCed GTX780(?) will compare to an OCed 8970. Due to being very disappointed with my current card, I'll be upgrading as soon as both are out.